20 top-performing growth funds over the past five years

Between ETFs, LICs, and unlisted unit trusts, there are plenty of options for investors today. But this presents a problem – for those who are agnostic about the vehicle they use, it can be tricky to compare performance.

For ETFs, you could go to the issuer’s website, or look at the ASX Monthly Listed Products Report. For LICs, again you can go to their website or the ASX report, or download their latest monthly report. For unlisted funds it’s harder again, though Livewire Markets’ Fund Comparison tool covers those (along with ETFs).

But doing a proper comparison across all the options in one place? Well, that requires some manual work, copying and sorting data by hand.

To help with the task, I’ve collated the data from:

• Livewire’s fund comparison tool,
• The ASX Listed Products Monthly Report,
• Issuer websites, and
• ASX announcements.

While I have made reasonable efforts to include all funds, LICs/LITs, and ETFs in my data, I may have missed some. If there is one that you believe should’ve made the list based on five-year performance, but didn’t, please let me know in the comments.

In this article, I’ll present the top 5 performing global active, global passive, Australian active, and Australian passive growth funds and ETPs over five years. I’ll also share some comments and observations, and add a few that didn’t quite make the cut, but are worthy of a mention due to longer term performance.

Why five years?

Ideally, I’d have used a much longer period than five years. Whether active or passive, fund performance is inherently noisy, and it takes many years, or even decades, to separate the signal from the noise.

As Michael Mauboussin – one of my favourite researchers and thinkers in the investment world – has noted in his work on skill versus luck, outcomes in noisy environments like investing can take many years to properly assess.

So a 30-year performance standard would be nice. But there’d be no funds on the list, so this would be a very short article.

Five years strikes a balance between offering some usefulness, while still having a reasonably sized sample to draw from.

That said, where a fund has a much longer and still relevant record, I’ll call that out separately rather than pretending five years tells the whole story.

Top five overall

Before we address the individual categories, here are the top five across all four categories:

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It’s hard to miss the skew towards resources here, with four of the five offering pure exposure to resources companies. It would be naive to think this is not a result of timing. If we’d done this list a few years ago, we’d likely have a lot more tech-focused funds at the top of the list.

Global active funds

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This is a challenging category for active managers, with only a small number of funds beating a passive benchmark. This is supported by data from S&P, which showed that in the five years to 31 December 2025, 89 percent of active managers underperformed the index after fees.

In my opinion, the fundamental problem for global active managers is two-fold:

1. The markets in which they tend to operate are highly competitive and highly liquid.
2. The largest companies, and therefore the largest weights in the indices, have performed extremely well in recent times.

PM Capital Global Opportunities Fund (ASX: PGF) stands out as the best performer among non-resources focused funds across all categories, and has been a consistent performer across many periods. The unlisted version of this fund has over 25 years of performance history, having been run the entire time by founder Paul Moore. During the entire history of the fund, its since-inception performance has never been below the benchmark. If there is such a thing as demonstrable alpha in active management, PM Capital Global Opportunities Fund makes one of the stronger cases in the Australian market.

For reference, over the last five years, iShares Global 100 ETF has returned 16.2% p.a., Betashares Nasdaq 100 ETF has returned 14.9% p.a., and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF has returned 13.9%. So, regardless of which passive benchmark you want to compare against, only the very top performers have beaten a passive ETF in this category. 

Global passive funds

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Two gold funds topping the list should probably come as a surprise to nobody. But even so, the scale of the outperformance vs broad benchmarks is somewhat shocking. Though the underlying index, holdings, and weightings all vary between VanEck Gold Miners ETF (ASX: GDX) and Betashares Global Gold Miners ETF - Currency Hedged (ASX: MNRS), the biggest difference is currency – GDX is fully exposed to currency movements, while MNRS is hedged to AUD. MNRS is also ex-Australia, clearly targeting investors who already have exposure to gold mining companies on the ASX.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that a huge part of that five-year performance for both funds came from the outsized returns of 2025, when both funds returned ~140%. The adage “Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance” is probably more relevant than ever here.

Betashares Global Energy Companies Currency Hedged ETF (ASX: FUEL) tells a similar story, with returns heavily concentrated in two strong bursts rather than spread evenly across the five-year period.

The key lesson is that with highly focused funds like these, especially when the underlying stocks are highly cyclical, the returns are often ‘feast and famine’. Investors either need impeccable timing or extreme patience and discipline to see returns like these.

Australian active funds

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The standout in this category was Lion Selection Group (ASX: LSX). It’s undoubtedly been a good period recently for gold companies, which form the majority of LSX’s holdings. But to outperform all other active funds, while investing primarily in small and micro resources, while holding significant levels of cash (approx. 30% at 31 March), is impressive.

While L1 Long Short Fund Ltd (ASX: LSF) does have a significant investment in gold companies, it’s not a gold or resources focused fund. While it does have some overseas holdings, I’ve included it here as the majority of its portfolio is Australian.

Also of note is Ophir Opportunities Fund, which managed to make the list despite holding minimal resources exposure – the fund doesn’t have a strict policy of not investing in resources, but is always underweight the sector.

The broader pattern is hard to ignore. Three of the five funds in this category have a clear resources focus, and a fourth, LSF, has benefited from meaningful exposure to gold. That does not invalidate the performance, but it does make the cycle an important part of the story.

For investors assessing active managers, the question isn't just “who performed best over five years?” It is also “what drove that performance, and is it repeatable?” A manager who has benefited from a powerful sector tailwind may still have displayed genuine skill, but the burden of proof is higher once the cycle turns.

Australian passive funds

Betashares Geared Australian Equities Complex ETF (ASX: GEAR) also needs an asterisk, given it is geared and therefore not directly comparable to a conventional index ETF.

What stood out more was the strength of financials. VanEck Australian Banks ETF (ASX: MVB) and SPDR S&P/ASX 200 Financials ex AREIT ETF (ASX: OZF) both made the list, reflecting a strong period for Australian banks and financial stocks. This is a useful reminder that passive does not necessarily mean broad or diversified. Sector ETFs can be even more concentrated than many active funds, even if the stock selection is rules-based rather than discretionary.

The other point worth noting is that the Australian passive list was much more tightly clustered than the global passive list. The gap between first and fifth was only 1.4 percentage points per annum, compared with more than 10 percentage points in global passive. In plain English, there was no single dominant theme in Australian passive exposures in the way gold miners dominated the global list.

Longer-term performers worth mentioning

A five-year screen is useful, but it can still miss funds with longer records or strong performance over other time periods. That matters because a fund that narrowly misses the five-year cut, but has delivered strong returns over 10 years or since inception, may be more interesting than a fund that simply had one exceptional run.

Betashares Nasdaq 100 ETF (NDQ)

Betashares Nasdaq 100 ETF (ASX: NDQ) missed the global passive top five on five-year performance, but has delivered a 10-year return of 19.9% per annum.

Part of the appeal of NDQ is that it provides exposure to a market with a long history of attracting many of the world’s highest-quality growth companies. The Nasdaq 100 is heavily tilted towards technology and technology-adjacent businesses, with very little exposure to resources, energy, or financials.

That makes it potentially complementary for many Australian investors, whose domestic portfolios are often tilted in the opposite direction.

Franklin Global Systematic Equity Fund

Franklin Global Systematic Equity Fund is also worth a mention. It narrowly missed the five-year list, but its longer-term record is solid, with a 10-year return of 13.9% per annum.

The fund is interesting because it sits somewhere between traditional active management and passive investing. Franklin describes the strategy as a systematic process that ranks global companies using factors such as cash flows, earnings growth, expectations, value, behavioural signals, and alternative data. In other words, it is active management, but with a disciplined quantitative process rather than a star stockpicker model.

Ausbil MicroCap Fund

Ausbil MicroCap missed the Australian active top five over five years, but its 10-year return of 13.8% per annum is still strong. From my own casual observations, it’s been one of those funds that seems to appear near the top of performance tables more often than chance alone would suggest.

That is especially notable given the fund had a portfolio manager change in 2017. Top-performing active funds can lose their edge when a key person leaves, particularly in less efficient parts of the market. The fact that Ausbil MicroCap has remained competitive since then is a point in its favour.

Microcaps are also one of the more plausible areas for active management to add value. Unlike global large caps, these companies are often under-researched, less liquid, and less widely owned by institutions.

There is, however, a catch. The fund is no longer open to new investors. That is one of the structural realities of microcap investing. Because these companies are small and illiquid, successful funds can run into capacity constraints quickly. Managers can respond by moving up the market-cap spectrum, which may dilute their edge, or they can keep taking money and risk owning too much of too many small companies. The better option is often to close the fund before performance suffers.

The people behind the performance

To better understand the active managers behind some of these results, it’s worth going back to the interviews we’ve published with them over the years.

We’ve spoken to many of the active managers featured above, so here is a selection of interviews and articles from the managers themselves.

Paul Moore – PM Capital

Paul was the guest for the first interview I sat in on while learning the ropes from James Marlay back in 2015.

However, I did speak to him several years later on The Rules of Investing – in January of 2020. At the time, Covid was barely on most investors’ radar, but a few weeks later, markets experienced one of the fastest shocks in modern history.

While Paul’s inflation thesis was initially overwhelmed by the Covid response, the broader argument looks more relevant in hindsight than it may have appeared in the months following publication.

Equities

The theme to dominate this decade in markets

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Or for a more recent discussion with Paul, Matthew Kidman from Centennial Asset Management had him on Success and More Interesting Stuff last year.

Equities

Paul Moore: The only true arbitrage in markets is time

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Hedley Widdup – Lion Selection Group

In a strange coincidence, Hedley was the guest for the first interview I conducted myself in 2016. I was able to track it down, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend spending your time on it.

Hedley’s not been active on Livewire for a while, so instead I’d point readers towards what one of my colleagues described as “probably one of the best corporate presentations I've ever seen.”

I’ll also be speaking with Hedley again soon.

Mark Landau and Rafi Lamm – L1 Capital

I spoke with Mark and Rafi on The Rules of Investing in 2021. You can listen to that episode here.

Equities

Where to next for L1 Capital after a winning vaccine trade?

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Or for a more recent chat, Chris Conway spoke with Rafi in March:

Commodities

“Less than halfway through the gold story”, L1 Capital launches high-performing strategy via new LIC

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Andrew Mitchell – Ophir Asset Management

Andrew is another Rules of Investing alumnus, who I spoke with in July of 2020:

Equities

How Ophir spot offshore growers (before they get big)

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And for a more recent discussion, Tom Stelzer spoke with him just last week:

Equities

Andrew Mitchell: These moments have proven to be the best time to invest

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Disclosure: The author of this article owns shares in LSX, MNRS, and HJPN.

Note: While I have made reasonable efforts to include all funds, LICs/LITs, and ETFs in my data, I may have missed some. If there is one that you believe should’ve made the list based on five-year performance, but didn’t, please call it out in the comments.

For consistency, I have focused on five-year annualised performance to 31 March 2026, where available. The list includes ETFs, LICs/LITs, and unlisted managed funds, but excludes funds without a five-year track record. Performance figures are shown after fees, but before tax, unless otherwise stated by the fund issuer.

Because different vehicles report performance in different ways, there may be minor inconsistencies between sources.